Resources

For posts about collections and electronic resource (including items we own, items we license, and others that are freely available but recommended by our staff in topical bibliography posts, etc.), due dates (if we continue to post due dates); database trials, preservation.

Posted onAugust 13, 2018byAshley Gosselar at the Special Collection Research Center

A new guide to the personal papers of Quincy Wright (1890-1970) is now available online. Wright was a political scientist and University of Chicago professor known for his work on war, international relations, and international law.

Wright joined the political science faculty at the University of Chicago in 1923, and was a professor of international law at the University from 1931 to 1956. He guest lectured at universities all over the world, and consulted for the government of the United States, including the U.S. Navy Department and the Department of State. He was also a technical advisor to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, and a consultant to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 1949. In addition to his teaching and consulting responsibilities, Wright authored dozens of books and hundreds of articles, among them A Study of War (1942) and The Study of International Relations (1955).

The papers document Wright’s interests in war, international law, world organization, and international cooperation, as well as the numerous organizations with which he was associated.

NASA has named its latest mission, the Parker Solar Probe, after UChicago physicist Eugene Parker, the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics.

According to the NASA website, the probe is “about the size of a small car and will travel directly into the Sun’s atmosphere about 4 million miles from the star’s surface. The primary science goals for the mission are to trace how energy and heat move through the solar corona and to explore what accelerates the solar wind as well as solar energetic particles. The mission will revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, where changing conditions can spread out into the solar system, affecting Earth and other worlds.”

Read one of Parker’s books or articles to learn more about his work. Learn more about Parker and listen to him discuss his research on solar wind on the UChicago News site.

And on a related note, a large addition to the papers of Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar are now available for research in the Special Collections Research Center.

HeinOnline has recently added the John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection. For those of you who have always wondered about the grassy knoll, but never had the time, energy, or resources to delve into the conspiracy theories, conflicting statements, and governmental records surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this collection offers all U.S. government documents relating to the assassination, including state and local law enforcement materials. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 directed the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to create the collection and provided that release of the documents begin in 2017, 25 years after the law was enacted. In October, 2017, the first set of 50,000 documents were released. 18,000 more documents were released and added to the database in April of 2018, and further documents will be added until the last set, which is scheduled to be declassified in 2021.

HeinOnline has organized and indexed the documents to make them easy for scholars to research. Approximately 58% of the documents from NARA came from the CIA, and another 37% from the FBI, according to the Data Visualization Charts that introduce the collection. HeinOnline has added to the documents a collection of books, hearings, scholarly articles, and other related works, to create a database that promises to be a rich resource for scholarship for years to come.

The Postcard Collection of Colonial Korea is now available online. This Collection includes 8,000 postcard images depicting the cultural, industrial, and technological status of Korea from the first half of the 20th century. The Collection is a valuable visual resource for Korean studies at the University and will be a significant primary source for research.

The Postcard Collection of Colonial Korea includes items created between 1900 and 1945 in Korea or abroad. It is organized into three sub-collections:

Busan Museum Collection

Saga Prefecture Nagoya Castle Museum Collection

Other images in 日本地理風俗大系 and 日本地理大系

With the introduction of photography and the ease of printing in the Western world, the popularity of photo postcards developed quickly in the late 19th century. The emergence of imperialism as a global trend led to a rapid increase in cultural curiosity about colonies which was helped with the production of postcards containing colonial landscapes. As travel became a new consumer culture for the public, buying and selling photo postcards as souvenirs became commonplace, and collecting photo postcards emerged as a new hobby.

With the Japanese advancement in Korea, images of Korea and Koreans were mass produced for Japanese photo shops and souvenir shops in the form of photo albums and postcards. The photo postcards of Korea were made in sets of eight under the name Chosŏn Customs that were continually reproduced during the colonial period. These photo postcards can be broadly classified according to the nature of the photos, such as governance and administration postcards, customs postcards, tourist postcards, and promotional postcards. Each set depicts specific content such as customs, tourism, cities, architecture, people, and statistics.

The Collection is valuable for its visual images of the cultural, industrial and technological side of Korea during the first half of the 20th century. Also, the first entity to produce photo postcards of colonial Korea was Japan, so the image of Korea portrayed in these late-modern photo postcards is not entirely free from imperialist and colonialist views. Imperial Japan created a specific representation of Korea through selectively chosen images that were presented as a careful overall reflection of the late Chosŏn period.

Creating the online collection

Seven institutions in North America—University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, University of Michigan, Duke, University of Toronto, and UCLA—acquired a copy of the scanned images of the Collection from a South Korean publisher in 2010. The seven institutions then formed a working group and collaboratively worked on metadata development, creating Korean Romanization, verifying Chinese and Japanese characters and adding English keyword search terms for each of the 8,000 postcards.

The University of Chicago’s copy of the Collection is currently stored at the LUNA program in the Visual Resources Center.

Special thanks to Bridget Madden, Associate Director at the Visual Resources Center for handling non-roman characters for the duration of this project and to Nanju Kwon, Korea Foundation Visiting Librarian Intern (2016-2017), who reviewed and corrected each of the 8,000 entries for verification.

The D’Angelo Law Library has subscribed to SCC Online. SCC Online has Indian Supreme Court and state High Court case law, pre-independence case law, central and state statutes, bills in Parliament, government policy documents, and reports of committees and commissions.

SCC Online is available to the entire University of Chicago community. Access is by IP address, but not anonymous–you must register and sign in with your uchicago email address, in the blank below the IP Access tab.

We welcome comments on SCC Online, how useful and user friendly you find it, and how it compares with our other Indian law database, Manupatra.

Posted onJune 20, 2018byAshley Gosselar at the Special Collection Research Center

The Special Collections Research Center’s collection of Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar‘s personal papers has more than doubled in size. Organization of the additional material has recently been completed by archivist Allyson Smally, and a new guide to the collection is available online.

The newly-opened portion of the collection contains writings – including handwritten notes and drafts – personal and professional correspondence, and a significant number of photographs. The additional material is described in the Addenda portion of the online guide.

A notebook from Chandrasekhar’s first year at Cambridge University, later dedicated to his wife Lalitha. Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. Papers, Box 208, Folder 5, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Congratulatory letter from University of Chicago President Hanna Holborn Gray, 1983. Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. Papers, Box 194, Folder 2, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was a faculty member at the University of Chicago for nearly 60 years. He made significant contributions to theoretical astrophysics, and is best known for his mathematical theory of black holes.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar pictured in 1936. University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf6-01301, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Palgrave Macmillan published a new edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics late last year. This updated version features new articles as well as articles from the two previous editions. It is now on the SpringerLink platform and offers easy downloading of articles as Adobe PDF documents.

The Library has access to two versions. First is the Living Edition, which is updated with new articles on a regular basis. Our links in the Library Catalog and on the Business & Economics guide point to this version. The second version is the text of the Third Edition as it was printed. The two versions are almost identical at this time, but the Living Edition will have new content added regularly.

This new edition has eliminated the ability to compare current and previous editions online. The first and second editions are available to use in Regenstein Library, shelved in the second floor reference collection at call number HB61 .N49

The University of Chicago Library has received the medals and academic papers of Nobel-winning physicist James Cronin, SM’53, PhD’55, the late UChicago scientist who made defining contributions to physics and astronomical observation.

James Cronin at the chalkboard. Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

Cronin’s children, Emily Cronin Grothe and Daniel Cronin, donated six medals that recognize his extraordinary achievements, including the 1980 Nobel Prize Medal for Physics and the 1999 National Medal of Science. His widow, Carol Cronin, donated his professional papers, including lab reports, articles, lectures, speeches, teaching materials, correspondence and other items.

James Cronin’s Nobel Prize Medal. Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. The Nobel Prize medal design mark is the registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation. (Photo by Jean Lachat)

“I am deeply grateful to the Cronin family for their invaluable gifts to the Library,” said Brenda Johnson, Library Director and University Librarian. “Making James Cronin’s papers and medals available to researchers and students not only helps us to understand the achievements of the past—it also fuels the rigorous inquiry of faculty and the transformative education we provide students. That is why the University of Chicago Library is committed to being the home of Nobel Prize winners’ research.”

Cronin earned his master’s degree and PhD in physics from UChicago in the 1950s. While conducting research in the 1960s at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and colleague Val Fitch studied subatomic particles coming off collisions between protons and atom nuclei and found the first example of nature’s preference for matter over antimatter. It was the first observation of a mystery that had baffled scientists for decades, and the breakthrough would earn them the Nobel Prize in 1980.

This finding was later used to provide support for the Big Bang theory, explaining why the explosion would produce more matter than antimatter—leaving remnants that would eventually became stars, planets and human life.

Studying the origin of cosmic rays

Cronin joined the UChicago faculty in 1971 as University Professor of Physics. He soon shifted course to study the origin of cosmic rays: mysterious, highly energetic particles that strike the Earth from elsewhere in the cosmos. To search for them, he co-founded the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina—a massive international collaboration to build a system of giant water tanks spread over an area ten times the size of Paris. It took its first readings in 2005, and just last year discovered extragalactic origins for some of the cosmic rays that strike Earth.

Photo of James Cronin (left) with apparatus and colleagues. Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

Cronin saw himself as part of a long lineage of UChicago physicists. In 2001, he organized a symposium marking the 100th anniversary of Fermi’s birth and edited the book Fermi Remembered. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004, it explored the enduring significance of Fermi’s work.

“In his first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Cronin studied with Enrico Fermi and developed a great respect for him,” said Daniel Meyer, director of the Special Collections Research Center. “When he was working on the Fermi centennial and publication, Cronin came to Special Collections frequently to do his own research in the Fermi papers. He examined all of Fermi’s original laboratory notebooks and located key letters and documents from Fermi’s career.”

Emily Cronin Grothe, LAB’78, said the University of Chicago Library was the right home for her father’s medals and papers.

“Our family has a long history with the University of Chicago, with my grandfather, father, mother, uncle and daughter all receiving advanced degrees from the institution,” she said. “Given that, and how proud my father was to be associated with the University and its remarkable approach and achievements in science, my brother Dan and I never wavered in our commitment to house my father’s papers and medals with The Library.”

Selected medals, awards and honors of James W. Cronin, including (left to right) the 1976 Franklin Institute John Price Wetherill Medal, the 1977 United States Department of Energy Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award Medal, the 1999 National Medal of Science, the 1999 Collège de France Service Medal, the 1980 Nobel Prize Medal for Physics, and the 1999 French Légion d’Honneur Chevalier Medal. Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. Photo by Jean Lachat. The Nobel Prize medal design mark is the registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation.

Sketches from notebook for CP experiment, JW Cronin Spring 1963. James Cronin Papers, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

A photograph of the apparatus used in discovery of the CP violation. A scientist is checking the electronics of the event detection system. Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

Notes ̴ at time of discussion of new physics ̴ 1955? Theoretical considerations on mesons and hyperons. Energy level scheme for new particles. (hyperons). Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.

Letter from James Cronin to President Clinton, June 20, 2000, concerning the founding of the Auger Observatory. Cronin thanks Clinton for his bringing up “the international cosmic ray project during your meeting with President de la Rua of Argentina.” Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library.